William S. Heckscher (1904–1999)

William Sebastian Heckscher was born in Hamburg in 1904, and after working for some years as a portrait painter, studied art history at Hamburg University. In 1936, as Hitler rose to power, Heckscher, a pacifist, fled Germany, first to Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, then England. In 1940 he was interned as an enemy alien and transported to Canada, where he ran a prison school for two years. After the war he became a naturalized Canadian citizen, and resumed an academic career, first as a teacher of languages, then returning to the Princeton Institute. After eight years at the University of Iowa, in 1955 he was appointed Professor of Medieval Art and Director of the Iconological Institute at Utrecht University. Heckscher retired from Duke University in 1974, to live in Princeton, New Jersey, and to catalogue and research emblem books in the University’s Firestone Library. He died in 1999.